Katarina Marčeta Reviews Reader, I by Corey Van Landingham

Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, winner of the 2012 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens (Tupelo Press), winner of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize, and Reader, I (forthcoming from Sarabande Books in Spring 2024). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, and The New Yorker. A recipient of a NEA Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Illinois.           

Reader, I (Sarabande Books) is available for purchase here.

Corey Van Landingham’s most recent collection of poems, Reader, I, draws on the epistolary form of Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic classic Jane Eyre while its speaker learns the intricacies of marriage and separating oneself from the “we.” While Brontë ends her novel with the infamous line, “Reader, I married him,” Van Landingham employs the phrase into her poems, creating a journal-esque letter of sorts for her speaker. She structures her collection into five major sections, with an introductory poem, a separate epilogue, and two entr’actes between sections I and II and IV and V respectively.

Van Landingham focuses on identity within marriage, of women learning to separate themselves from their marriage and look beyond the self. Her speaker explores the delights and thrills of womanhood and the subsequent vexations and headaches. She incorporates centuries-old tales in her poetry, giving voices to the women who were silenced in favor of men. We see this in her introductory poem, “Reader, I [was, according to Virgil]”:

The left-behind wives and the wailing, those empires built on our shades. Dactyls upon
dactyls of bridal beds aflame, sad wraiths, lustrous oceans of tears. As if women were a
climate, a misdirection of wind….And yes, Aeneas, too, weeps. In the underworld, Dido
wandering the Fields of Mourning, and he wants to know–he wants to know if he made
her do it, bring her body down, on top of his sword. Was I the cause? he asks… She is
granite she is dim moon she is dark grove is sea unchartable. She will not return. She will
not return his gaze.

Throughout the rest of Reader, I, Van Landingham incorporates this allusion to women of the past and their sufferings as wives as a result of patriarchal norms and society, relating it to modern times. Van Landingham makes quick work of the misogynistic ideals forced upon women, especially in marriage, noticeable in her poem, “Mamma V’s Basement Lounge,” where the speaker witnesses a frat party where girls dressed as brides are handcuffed to their grooms:

Then they are handcuffed–small, 
uncomfortable laugh–
to their grooms. Mild protesting.
Shy looking back. They perform
their duties. In the musty frat house
a new bride undoes 
with her one free hand
the neat bow at her nape, cleans,
we’re told, some piled
dishes, scrubs on her knees
the grimy tile. This
is what they think of marriage.

We see more references to the “traditional” marriage in Van Landingham’s work, especially in her poem, “Reader, I [am not so hollow-boned],” where the speaker succumbs to a moment of weakness and flees from the troubles of her marriage, which Van Landingham delivers in an emotional, freeing tone complete with her quintessential lyrical lines. The speaker eventually returns home, tail between her legs, offering a minute of relinquishment:

Understand, reader, that to some women harbor means point of departure – cold,
stone-walled bay. Vino, veritas. We revolve around future absence. Exactly. You only
know the plum is bitter when you’ve sunk your teeth into its skin. Zeus wielded the
thunderbolt; cow-eyed Hera stayed home.

However, Van Landingham reveals, in a more optimistic tone, a turning point for her speaker, suggesting that happiness can be found within the “confines” of a marriage, in “Reader, I [was one of many].” Here, the speaker realizes that she does have a chance to not end up like the many women before her, that she can and does deserve happiness. Van Landingham writes:

Reader, I was one of many, in a long ancestral line, one of thousands of women to fuse
herself to sorrow…From village syntax of sacrifice. From heavy bread. Women who
salted the pot with a baby at the breast. Women who strained eyes, peeling their faces,
each night, reflected in soft potatoes…Are there moments – the shirked hour of grading,
the plucked tulip – that can exist unscathed? What of those giddy nights of dancing in
dark clubs? What of Miami’s long beach, of mai tais? What of picnics? What of my toe
slipped into his mouth?

Van Landingham concludes her collection in a beautiful and raw, loving and real epilogue of promises titled “Lyrical Vows,” where she not only illustrates imagery in the most melodic nature but alludes to the experiences of women before the speaker: “Supposedly, the salvation of the entire human race required the apology of a woman.”. Equipped with heartfelt vows, she exposes marriage in its true form, as a reality of harshness and hard times, yet full of tenderness and warmth.

Altogether, Van Landingham creates an honest, blunt account of finding oneself in marriage while wrestling with the conflicting ideas of becoming one. With lyrical lines reminiscent of the classical poets and armed with a boatload of irony Jane Austen would be proud of, Van Landingham paints a portrait of what it is to be human.

Katarina Marčeta is an undergraduate student at Arizona State University studying English with a concentration in Creative Writing and minoring in Slavic Studies. An Arizona native, most of her work includes fiction and poetry, with a background in editing and journalism. When she isn't writing, she can be found planning her next trip abroad or discovering new novels to read.